I'm in love with my Sonos set-up. It's one of the easiest music systems I have ever installed and it finally gives Ellen and me access to our entire CD collection AND much, much more. This weekend I even purchased a second Play5 unit to have music in our Library.

It all started more than a year ago when I dug into the different solutions for a centralized music library. I selected three potential candidates to get our relatively large music library in the "home cloud".

Our requirements were relatively simple:

play the music through our home HiFi set-up

a simple user interface that didn't need an extra device like a TV, smartphone or tablet

excellent audio quality

easy access

At that moment in time I couldn't find anything that fitted those requirements. The biggest hurdle was the "easy access" requirement. Every solution required some kind of controller, be it a smart phone, a general purpose tablet or a dedicated controller. One year later, our requirements changed as we now have enough smart devices that can double as controllers.

iTunes combined with Airport Express

being an Apple user, I obviously looked at what iTunes had to offer. Combined with an Airport Express one can hook up his/her iTunes library to a HiFi set-up. Alternatively there's the AppleTV, but it requires a flatscreen HDMI television set to get the right user experience.

PRO

Being Apple centric, this solution works out of the box and I could keep my collection on the machine I use to digitize the CDs.

CON

Ideally you have something like a Mac Mini to manage the library; we only have laptops.

My Netgear NAS has support to run as an iTunes server, but every time Apple updates iTunes, it can break the NAS. And I would still need to copy everything to the NAS and keep it synchronized.

Tests showed that WiFi streaming over the Airport Express was less than stable. Often the stream would simply halt.

The User Interface was another hurdle. An iDevice is needed to access the library. With the AppleTV, a HDMI television set is mandatory to access the library.

Every hard disks manufacturer has some kind of media player enhanced device. Unfortunately these devices are made for video which implies that audio/music comes as an added bonus. In other words, without a flatscreen television they are simply worthless.

Conclusion: as these devices requires a dedicated User Interface via a television set, they are impractical as audio devices.

SONOS:

SONOS is one of the few manufacturers that focuses solely on the audio market. Their devices are first and foremost audio devices that are used to play your music collection from your own "home cloud".

Multiple SONOS devices can play music in sync or individually depending on what the user(s) wants.

From personal experience I've never encountered such a simple solution, it is literally plug and play. Technically it's an elegantly engineered solution that takes care of most of the hassle. All you need to do is connect one SONOS device to your wired home network after which the devices take care of creating their own wireless network, invisible to the rest of your home set-up.

SONOS devices not only play your personal music but can also stream thousands of internet radios and have access to services like Deezer, Spotify and the sorts.

You can use your Mac or Windows PC or use any smart devices to control your SONOS set-up.

PRO

has a multitude of different audio devices, some with their own amplifier and loudspeakers, others dedicated to link your SONOS-enabled "home cloud" to your HiFi set-up.

multiple controllers are available for Mac, Windows, iDevices and Android.

price tag, some components are ridiculously expensive (like the SUB and the CONNECT.)

Conclusion: being audio centric and delivering a great and simple user experience with high quality components results in a fantastic audio experience. SONOS might not be the cheapest solution in the market, but so are Apple products. In this specific niche market, SONOS is Apple: great quality and a perfect user experience.

More than a year ago, SONOS wasn't the solution as we were running short in the controller department. Since then Ellen and I have both an Android smartphone which removed the last hurdle for creating our SONOS-powered musical "home cloud".

Fixing cover art issues

I imported our music collection of 600+ CDs into iTunes over the years. iTunes did a great job at adding covers where it could and those covers iTunes couldn't find, were added later using CoverScout.

iTunes sampled everything using Apple lossless compression, resulting in thousands of *.m4a files. *.m4a files allow inclusion of cover art, yet Apple decided to optimize this by storing cover art in a centralized folder. As a result when I copied my *.m4a files to my NAS I noticed that not all albums had cover art. As of a certain version of iTunes, cover art was no longer part of the *.m4a file but stored in a hashed directory.

Moreover, some cover art that was added using CoverScout didn't show up on mobile devices, yet it did show up on the standalone SONOS applications.

Below is an example of this... note the missing "At the Ryman", "Faith no More" and "Bach" covers.

SONOS application on MacOS X

SONOS application on iPAD

Cover art that was available in iTunes, but didn't show up in any of the controller applications was added by using a nifty little tool called "Save Album Art to Album Folder" which basically extracts cover art from iTunes, regardless how it was added to the library. You end up with a folder full of *.jpg files which need to be copied to the NAS where your SONOS library resides. Simply copy them in the right album folder and rename the file to folder.jpg and the SONOS controller apps will pick up the cover art.

I have some *.m4a files with cover art, which the SONOS application on mobile devices doesn't want to display. The trick here is to remove the embedded cover art and replace it with a folder.jpg file.

I found a toolkit on Linux that works perfectly to list, add and remove covert art from mp4-files. You can find it here (MP4v2). Follow the instructions to install the toolkit, some Linux distributions contain the toolkit in their standard repositories. You might first try to add it with "yum install" or "apt-get install".

Below are some screenshots that show there is actually cover art in the Emmylou Harris files:

Listing the artwork in "At the Ryman"

Removing and adding cover art is done respectively with mp4art --remove and mp4art --add. Check the man-pages for detailed information on all options.

I removed the cover art as shown below:

Removing the art work using mp4art.

I looked for a suitable cover via Google, copied it to the NAS and renamed it to folder.jpg.

A 500x500 cover from Amazon should do the trick...

Let's see if this actually worked and the mobile SONOS application shows the cover now:

JACKPOT! That did the trick!!!

Getting your covers peachy on your SONOS cloud takes some manual fiddling around, especially when you digitize your CDs with a recent version of iTunes. As the more recent iTunes no longer stores cover art in the *.m4a files, you'll need to extract them from iTunes and copy/rename them manually to the appropriate folder on your NAS.

You, sir, madam or bot are one clever cookie! The Sonos system is audio only. No need to improve the picture :-p

Reply

Phil

1/2/2018 05:01:15 pm

So, it's 5+ years later, but I just discovered an app called bliss (see https://www.blisshq.com/sonos-album-art.html ) which has versions for multiple platforms, and will fix your music library, INCLUDING adding a folder.jpg file with artwork that is compatible with SONOS.

I've just downloaded it now, and it's running now. So far, I really like it. The first 100 "fixes" are free. You have to buy additional fixes, or you can pay for "unlimited" fixes.